


What you leave behind/What you choose to be

by AlterEagle



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Hellmouth Sunbeams (Blaseball Team), How Do I Tag, If you. Uh. Consider the Sun a "canonical Blaseball character", Mentions of Burns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:54:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28710795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEagle/pseuds/AlterEagle
Summary: Nerd Pacheco falls in love with a shard of the universe.A shard of the universe was not prepared for their head coach to prematurely collapse into a black hole.Nerd wasn't prepared either.
Relationships: Nerd Pacheco/Lars Taylor
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. THE CRABS ACCUMULATE 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lars Taylor gains his first ever pitching star, and a moon party is hastily concluded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first fic, for anything, pretty much ever. Blaseball will do that to a them apparently. 
> 
> I originally shared the main beats of this story in the Solarium, the Sunbeams side discord, and without the enthusiasm and amazing vibes of the folks in there this fic would never have happened.
> 
> This is a work of collaborative fiction.
> 
> Title is from Muse's "Invincible"

#### Tot Fox hits a Single! 1 scores.

The last time it happened had been the end of Season 6.

#### THE CRABS ACCUMULATE 10

Nerd had hurried down one of Sigmund’s corridors, passing Zack Bickle and Miguel who were chattering excitedly about “vibe-fixing rhizomes” and clearly conspiring to make good on some shared brainwaves of the botanically-experimental variety. Signals and symbols and covert little gestures still burst behind Nerd’s eyes, fresh from the election announcement not five minutes ago. The Flowers had netted Sharing Signs for all of Wild Low, and Nerd was keen to talk strategy with Sandoval. 

Sigmund murmured a warning, but a telepathic castle teammate that your blaseball team and sort-of family moved into earlier in the season took some getting used to - not that Sigmund could’ve prepared Nerd for what he saw when he burst into the room.

Sandoval and Lars, the latter starting with surprise and breaking eye contact with the other to look up at Nerd. The glowing eye which would normally hover steady over Lars’ face guttered, like candlelight buffeted by a solar flare. He drew a shaking breath, and Nerd thought the exhale more like a distant furnace’s roar.

Sandoval wheeled round too, eyes aglow with enough sunlight to make Nerd wince and squint. Sandoval made a frustrated noise, and something shifted within the portals on Lars’ face. 

“Damnit. Lars, look at me.” Lars shuddered, cracks appearing across him as the light behind his eyes seemed to surge, intensify, try to force its way out-

“Shit-”

Sandoval barked something, but Nerd couldn’t hear it over a subsonic roar, a rushing crackle, and a whistling in his ears as a rug bucked underfoot, tossing Nerd out of the room. The last thing he saw before the door slammed closed was Lars’ silhouette, bright and hot as the sun, warped and shimmering through a riot of spectral hands.

\---

Nerd was up in a flash, but Sigmund warned him before he could try the door again. Just as well, as the iron handle was red-hot. Nerd had to settle for pacing the corridor, sick with not knowing if Lars was okay, what he’d just seen, how he could help instead of eating himself up with worry, how an election blessing could’ve had that effect, what he should’ve done instead of barging in and _freaking Lars out badly enough for him to go nuclear-_

A rocky talon stopped Nerd in his tracks, with surprising gentleness. One of Sigmund’s grotesques, griffinesque with a mossy pelt and a basin under its other forelimb, loaded up with bandages and topical medicine. 

_“Ser Sandoval hath bid me fetch these unctions, and that thou wouldst administereth them.”_

“Thanks, Sigmund. Are they-”

_“‘Figures he’d have questions, fine, guess we’re doing this now’, forsooth, was Ser Sandoval’s reply whence I told them of thine lingering.”_

\---

Sandoval was forthright with answers, though they seemed to search Nerd’s face with each question, as if looking for some kind of intent. 

Yes, Lars had “celestial affiliations”, and no, Sandoval really could not be more specific than that. All it took was to start joining the dots, making little constellations from the occasional odd statements on Lars’ part (the kind of thing Nerd had simply put down to Lars being his strange, incomprehensible, lovely self), and it all made far too much sense. Sandoval chuckled.

“I’m honestly surprised.”

“Why?”

“That my occasional warnings to you, to drop whatever line of questioning you’d latched onto with Lars’ origins, didn’t spur you into getting to the bottom of it.”

“Wait. Do you seriously think I’m that contrary?”

Sandoval hummed. “Not contrary, just… insatiable. I appreciate it, anyhow.”

Through these affiliations, Lars _could_ access unfathomable cosmic power; and yes, clearly, if his nascent grasp of how objects move through three-dimensional space from a pitching mound to a catcher’s mitt was anything to go by, the operative word there was _could_. 

Whether it was the information dump from one blessing or the other was a moot point; where the knowledge had given the rest of the team something new to mull over, it had instead _reminded_ Lars of something. Something forgotten, of which Sandoval suspected there was a whole lot of, something from _before_ \- _before_ the return of blaseball, _before_ Sandoval had fished Lars out of a blackened-glass crater in the Moab Desert some six seasons ago, perhaps even _before_ blaseball itself. 

Whenever in Lars’ mysterious existence it harked back to, it was quite enough something, in fact, that it was more than could be reasonably expected of a normal human being to have memories of. Lars _remembering_ had been a potential issue on Sandoval’s radar for a while now,

“-and honestly? It could’ve gone a lot worse than this.”

Nerd tried not to acknowledge the cocoon which floated overhead, a great cage of perfectly still spectral hands. It gave off a warm and steady light, completely at odds with the ash-blackened room. Sandoval’s injuries weren’t as close to bad as Nerd had feared, given the untouchable heat of the door handle. The only burns needing real attention were on the palms of Sandoval’s hands - like they’d gripped a pipe carrying boiling water. The rest was more like sunburn, all up the pitcher’s arms, in a patchwork of handprints - like comical shorthand aftermarks of a good smack - overlapping here and there. Like something - someone - had grasped on, and found their way into an embrace through touch alone.

But no, Lars wasn’t going to budge until he woke up, which by Sandoval’s estimation would only take a couple of days at most. And no, Sandoval sighed, with exasperation at first before relenting, it wasn’t Nerd’s fault. Ideally, Sandoval could’ve talked Lars out of fighting the deluge of memories, use their own arrangement with Sol to demonstrate how you could safely channel the power of one star, but - but this was fine.

Yes, this would probably happen again if Lars gained (regained?) more stars. No, Sandoval had no idea what would happen if Lars ended up losing stars at some point, or gaining all his stars at once.

Lars was able to convalesce without incident, with more than a little assistance from Sigmund. Nerd spent the first night cleaning up the room, refurnishing it with the help of the grotesques, planning all the while how best to explain to the team what happened, to pre-empt and navigate around any thorny follow-up questions. 

All of which, in the end, was rendered null and moot by Miguel James’ response to Nerd’s very awkward announcement at breakfast. “Falling asleep completely arbitrarily, and not waking up for a day or three? You mean like I ended up doing that time I tried to fistfight the entire Firefighters blaseball team in an Arbly’s parking lot?”

So that seemed to settle the matter.

Nerd managed to keep away for all of three hours, before giving up and relocating his paperwork to Lars’ room. He felt more than a little silly at first, rambling at a silent room about the students whose work he was grading, or bemoaning their run-on sentences, but Sigmund kept him company - and the glow from Lars’ cocoon was perfect to read by.

#### THE SUN COLLAPSES

Season 10. Game 3 of the Internet Series Championship, bottom of the eighth. Nagomi Nava appears at Nerd’s side, scaring the hell out of him and wrenching his gaze away from the championship game.

“You’re going to evacuate the moon,” says Nagomi. She’s still wearing her party hat.

“Wh-” Nerd points at himself, shoots a questioning glance and a gesture Sandoval’s way, and doesn’t manage to point at the omnipresent Sol because Nagomi slaps him and yanks him to eye level by the collar of his uniform.

“I do not have time to fuck around and be cryptic right now, Pacheco.” Her voice is joyless and flat, devoid even of the tiny smirk that would normally come with her precognitive advice. Her visible eye is exhausted. She pulls a dozen scrunched-up pages from her pocket, and shoves them into Nerd’s arms. “You wrote the book on this,” she says.

Nerd looks at the paper - it’s a section from Nerd’s own Comprehensive Emergency Manual, ripped unceremoniously out and scribbled over with sharpie. There’s an entire decision tree about estimating crowd sizes and delegating evacuation marshals blacked out, with a number in the mid-hundreds and a list of players that Nerd can tell at a glance are some of the most responsible in the league. 

Nerd looks up at Nagomi, swallows his apprehension, and nods. Somewhere behind him, he hears Zack’s sunbeast roar curdle into something anguished and wounded and oh so very human.

“Get reading. You’ve got three minutes of daylight. Then get Hahn, she’s over with the Dale.”


	2. RETROCAUSAL EVENT RECORDED

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Beck Whitney takes point.

#### INITIATING PLAYBACK:

It takes - it took - approximately two hundred seconds for Sol’s light to cross the void of space and reach someone standing on the Immaterial Plane, or a little quicker if you were floating above the Plane itself on the Moon.

The Sunbeams didn’t need to wait for the Sun’s final rays to know something was wrong; by the time Nerd’s scanned the dossier and taken off in less than a minute toward the Dale’s neon-decked camp, Zack’s roar is mere background noise to the thudding heartbeat in Nerd’s ears. But then Iggy’s shoved him aside, sent several others in the crowd sprawling as he breaks through the press of people and _leaps_ into a crater, _screaming_ all the while for them to get out of the way, give us space-

#### WARNING: SUN 1 LOW FUEL

There’s an _explosion_. A supernova. A star spent of fuel, farewelling the universe in a final conflagration.

A jet of flame shoots several dozen feet into the lunar sky. Fire spills from the crater, a scorching radius filled with burning bystanders and chased by a roiling wave of heat that thankfully, Nerd’s Adapted antlers manage to soak up. 

He shouldn’t look back. There’s no time to ask why, what happened, to see if Iggy’s hurt or check for casualties or allay the cries that there’s umpires on the moon. Nerd’s burning daylight, and he wonders if the rising panic in his chest isn’t the chaos, if something in _him_ has died with Sol too and he’s next to fall apart and-

“Nerd! Over here!”

Hahn’s voice snaps him out of it, and Nerd’s relieved to see her weaving through the crowd, Beck Whitney at her left and the hazy, tealish ripple in the air better known as Raúl Leal on her right. Beck’s quick round the bases and a level head with enhanced darkvision, Raúl’s limited only to the speed of sound and has no trouble making himself heard over a crowd. Both were on Nagomi’s list. 

Beck’s first to reach Nerd (well, Raúl does close the gap first, but he speeds right past in a whoosh of sirens and dubstep.) 

“Is it umpires?” she asks, but Raúl’s slingshotted back and rumbles in the negative before Nerd can answer. 

“Two folks in Sunbeams gear, Beck. One’s the Delacruz guy, but I didn’t recognise the other.”

Beck frowned. “Is this because Tot Fox-”

“-Yeah. I mean, probably. Sorry,” Nerd steps in, taking a deep breath. He realises Nagomi’s list is crushed tight in his hand, and tries to smooth it out as he waves Hahn over. “Beck, Raúl, Hahn. I need your help. Nagomi said we need to evacuate the moon, immediately. Sol’s-” dead? Dying? Destroyed? “-the Sun’s about to go out, and I, I guess that Peanut’s coming back after this, but the score’s tied again? and-” 

“The shuttles, Nerd?” Hahn interrupts. Right. Focus.

“Yeah. Thanks. We have to get everyone on the shuttles, but logistically it’s easier if we get everyone into Sigmund. Bigger front doors, for one. So. Hahn, Sigmund needs to be brought up to speed, they should organise rooms off the front foyer for each team. Raúl, please go and get the word out. If you see anyone on this list-”

“-they’re doing the head count for their teams,” surmises Beck. Nerd nods, and Beck speed-reads the list again. “Right. Raúl, you go to the Mild High tents, they’re furthest away, then find the Mild Low reps properly on the way back. Aldon’s quick, so’s Picklestein. Ve should help you spread the word. Make sure to let Mooney and Twooney know if you see them, either should know best if there’s anywhere other than the Sea of Tranquility needing a sweep.” Raúl rattles off a series of rapidfire brass notes in salute, then zips off.

“I’ll take Wild Low, then Wild High.” Beck exhales, realises she’s getting a little too close to melancholy, and manages to smile at Hahn and Nerd. “Let’s be fair, I know half the teams at this point.”

Everything’s threatening to happen too fast again, and Nerd can’t crack a smile back. He’s still thinking logistics, suddenly not content with coordinating, with simply reacting to crisis after compounding crisis, he needs to-

“Nerd.” Beck squeezes his arm. “Go and find your team.” A short, simple goal. “Get them home safely.”

Hahn’s taken his other hand in hers, another encouraging squeeze. There’s concern in her eyes, but no fear. Nagomi’s words: “ _You’re going to evacuate the moon._ ”

Nerd squeezes back. “Right. Yeah. Thanks.”


	3. PRESSURE AT CRITICAL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lars reaches out, and a goose is transported.

Lars Taylor’s sitting on the rim of Engel’gardt, on the far side of the moon. It’s the top of the eighth, with Montgomery Bullock pitching. It’s quiet enough up here on the Selenean summit, away from the crowds, to be a different kind of noisy. It’s where the lunar air is thin and ripples in the solar wind, every surge and sigh of Sol’s corona close enough for Lars to reach up and feel dance across his spectral fingers.

Simon Haley, Lars’ friend on the Shoe Thieves, recommended the spot to him when the Beams and the Fridays announced the Party Time venue. Lars loved this place, in much the same way he’d loved the ocean when Sandoval first took him to see it after their first game in Baltimore. 

It’s the top of the eighth, with Montgomery Bullock pitching, two outs and bases clear. Richardson Games is up for the Shoe Thieves, wilding the Grappling Hook.

Lars has spent most of the post-season just sitting here, hearing patterns wrought by plasma and echoed in the atmosphere. It’s Lars’ favorite kind of conversation, the kind he’ll often have with Nerd, just listening and learning and experiencing.

It’s peaceful here, and Lars doesn’t get to chat with Sol like this often. Too much magnetosphere to feel the solar wind, down on the Immaterial Plane. He missed this, and doesn’t know why.

Richardson Games hit a ground out to Pedro Davis. It’s the bottom of the eighth. 

The air stills. The light from distant stars seems to jolt, as if the heliosphere were rattled by deep, harsh coughs.

Pedro Davis hit a ground out to Stu Trololol. 

Lars frowns. Silvaire Roadhouse on second. Gets slowly to his feet. Tot Fox batting for the Crabs. 

Something’s wrong.

\---

Evacuation went smoothly, even with the sunlight cut short. The Lovers and the Mills, who had only just arrived on the moon earlier that day, scrambled to set up triage in Sigmund’s foyer to handle the scrapes and sprains of partygoers fleeing a satellite en masse, as well as those burned by sudden fireballs or Moon Roombas spooked by the panic.

Fireballs which  _ weren’t _ Iggy, as Nerd discovered shortly after. But first: 

Hendricks, standing draconic head and shoulders above most of the crowd, spotted Nerd carrying Sutton and cleared a quick path with but a few irate clicks of the firebreath ignition in his throat. The swallowed flame also served to light his chest, throat, and jaws from within with a faint bronze glow, normally invisible under the Hellmouth sun but a much easier beacon for Nerd to reach in the dark.

“Evening, professor,” rumbled Hendricks, “Miss Nava commandeered a private shuttle, which seems a wiser place for... all of  _ you _ , given the ruckus over in Sigmund.” Hendricks pointed out into the dark, in a direction that wasn’t the castle, who had all their windowed rooms lit and braziers crackling. 

Nerd sighed. Of  _ course _ Nagomi had. He adjusted an already-awkward grip on Sutton, and eventually with a little squinting saw what might’ve been the dim square of an open ship interior in the distance. Nerd was tempted to just give Hendricks the goose and have the dragon ferry it over while Nerd got back to finding the rest of the Sunbeams, but was interrupted by a polite cough.

The internal glow of dragonfire was fast fading, but Nerd could still by the faint light of it see that Hendricks had lowered into a crouch, his near wing raised to give Nerd an easier one-handed climb onto Hendricks’ back. The dragon huffed with… embarrassment?

“Can’t fly on this damnable rock,” snorted Hendricks. “Not enough air and far too much float on the way down.” Nerd considered going through the bare minimum of verbal courtesy-jockeying, decided he didn’t have the time or energy, and simply clambered on. While the ride wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, it took most of Nerd’s focus to keep his balance while clutching his cargo.

“So,” so Hendricks. “What the dickens happened to that goose?”

_ “I don’t know” _ , Nerd doesn’t manage to say, even if his fellow college professor would be the last guy on the moon to begrudge Nerd for not having an explanation at hand. Nerd’s seen the village in control, and Nerd’s seen the avatar, and either one of them would’ve delivered a bruising bite to his arm by this point for carrying it like a bowling ball. He wants answers, or at least the time to find them, for his own selfish needs first  _ before  _ he has to front up, explain it to the curious, to those coming to him for expertise.

Sutton Bishop - insidious anseriform, bane of ankles, avatar of chaos, and the only tenuous connection one British village had to the rest of reality - had frozen. If Nerd had been out of habit, loosened up a little and  _ not _ kept a very careful eye on Sutton’s last known location, he might’ve had to give up the search in the dark. Nerd would’ve laughed, before this ill-fated party, at the suggestion he’d ever be relieved to see Sutton. Instead, he’d spotted a telltale plaid cap among the mess left behind at the Fridays cookout, and the watery beam from his phone torch caught Sutton in the moon dust, knocked on its side like some kind of garden ornament. 

Nerd had laughed as he picked up the goose, laughed as it was completely unresponsive, ridiculously dense but just shy of what he couldn't carry under lunar gravity. The sound had struck him as deranged.

Nerd can only shrug in response, and he’s grateful that Hendricks doesn’t press him further.

Hendricks bounds and glides to a final halt, and Nerd’s arms are leaden from carrying what he’s estimating is half a metric ton of eldritch horror masquerading as waterfowl. He tosses Sutton aside, freeing up both hands to dismount Hendricks. The dragon frowns as the goose sails through the air, arresting its movement with a touch of his tail. “Professor, are you sure you should-”   
  
“No,” says Nerd, “I’m not.” Nerd moves to catch Sutton out of the air, but his fingers slip on the almost-polished surface. Hendricks frowns, rears up on his hind legs and reaches out to grab it. “I’m really not.”

“...Nerd.”

“I’ll be a minute. Two, tops.” He’s already got his back to Hendricks, taking the ramp up into the ship’s cargo hold. The interior’s clearly not dragon-sized, but Hendricks would be able to get Sutton inside, at least. “Can you wait for me outside? I'll check in with Gomi, then go and find any of us still out here.”

“... Of course, Professor.”

\---

Sol’s  _ hurt _ . Dying. Their visible spectra still hangs in the sky, and the sight of it fills Lars with a deep revulsion against the sub-sub-sub-sonic groans of the heliopause sagging. Crisp words from a mouth with its tongue torn out. There’s something deep inside him roaring, something he’s only heard once before - fair fainter than now, when Lars saw his first incineration. 

Rhys Trombone, crumbling into ash when Sol couldn’t watch over them.

Sol was the head coach of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. Sol was meant to be untouchable, ineffable, and more than a little aloof at the best of times. Sol was meant to protect them. Sol was a main-sequence star with enough hydrogen to last them another four billion years. 

Sol wasn’t supposed to die here. Sol wasn’t supposed to  _ screech their millennia-spanning eulogy in the time it took Forrest Best to step up to the plate. _

So Lars does the only thing he can do, and that’s to scream for help. And when there’s nobody on the Moon who can hear him, when Sol’s light has run dry and the air hangs so still it makes Lars’ hands balk at moving through it, something deep in Lars’ chest  _ cracks _ and he begs for  _ anyone,  _ anyone to help, with a scream that burns his throat and shudders his bones and leaves the taste of ozone on his tongue-

And every. single. star. in the cosmos is suddenly in Lars’ head.

It’s a cacophony. They’re yelling at him in panic, where did he go, is he ok, an outpouring of love and relief and disbelief and parental panic and no small amount of fury and a trillion questions at once, its- 

It's all too much. Lars raises a hand, raises uncountable blinding hands, to cover his ears and block out the choir.

Everything goes white.


End file.
